AI War Beta 6.033-6.034 "Bonus Tricks" Released!

[keith.lamothe]

(Crossposted from this blog post)

This one includes another big chunk of content for the upcoming Vengeance of the Machine expansion.  We've already got quite a few alpha testers smashing at it, but it would benefit from more so if you're interested in alpha testing for the expansion, please shoot me a PM in the forums.


Anyway, this release includes 4 of the 6 new bonus ship types planned for the expansion:

* The Lightning Torpedo Frigate, which fires miniature lightning warheads.

* The Zenith Devastator, a starship that isn't really a raider (kinda slow, for one), but can shoot right through forcefields to get at the juicy targets underneath.  So more helpful in a stand-up battle versus a big pile of shields (exos, anyone?) than a Raid Starship.

* The Neinzul Railpod, a two-shot railgun that can be mass produced at alarming speed.

* The Zenith Hydra, which breathes flame and regenerates (no idea where Hearteater could have gotten the idea from).


There are also seven new types of AI guardian, ranging from the relatively straightforward (but dangerous) Needler Guardian to the outright terrifying Infiltration Guardian.


Perhaps most interesting of all (to me, anyway) is the new AI Planetary Subcommanders: generally only a few planets in a given game will have one, and you won't see them flying around or whatever, but you'll probably notice when you see the very... um, peculiar choices they make in command stations, guard posts, and where to put those.


There's also several (not necessarily expansion-related) bugfixes and balance changes and miscellaneous improvements.  For one, I'm sure many of you will be happy to see your blade spawners and ally enclaves (and player enclaves, for that matter) not dumping endless numbers of ships onto your homeworld just because of that stupid subspace signal off in deep space.

Update: 6.034 hotfix to fix an unhandled errors problem with CPA launches due to the attempt to make the carriers not drop on neutered planets.  A few other small changes in there too.

Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the  in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time.  If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

[Mánagarmr]

Sweet! Anxious to sink my teeth into this one after I've finished moving ^^

[Vyndicu]

I will have to finish my current private alpha campaign first and my close to complete fallen spire campaign (Planning to have 20 spire city hub heheh).

Before I try those new toys out.

[Wingflier]

Awesome, can't wait to try it out

[Aklyon]

The Neinzul Railpod, a two-shot railgun that can be mass produced at alarming speed.

This sounds like something that could get very silly very fast if you did it right

[keith.lamothe]

This sounds like something that could get very silly very fast if you did it right

The motto of the Neinzul race!

"That's not a Space Dock.  That's a Doom Cannon."

[Kahuna]

I just looked at the Neinzul Railpod (stats).. why is it so overpowered? It's dps is: 9360/2*192=898560.. that's without the multipliers.. and that's more than Bobmers' dps with multipliers. With multipliers: 898560*6=5391360. Is it really that op? Did I calculate the dps correctly? Am I missing something?

EDIT: oh.. self destruct after 2 shots.. well.. that might still be too much. 8 Mobile Space Docks spamming Railpods would probably obliterate everything.

EDIT2: So all Mark I Railpods shoot twice before they die.. so they will do 10782720 damage (with multiplier). This takes 2 seconds. Rebuilding them with 8 MSDs takes 24 seconds.. so if the MSDs keep spamming them they will do 224640 dps (with multiplier) Bulletproof Fighter (It's a very good ship so I use it as a comparison) does 712800 dps with multiplier.. so it would take 8 seconds for Bulletproof Fighters to "catch up". During the 8 seconds Railpods will do 1797120 damage and it will take 3 seconds for the BpFs to catch up again and so on. They might not actually be that op. Will have to do some testing.. but when I first looked at the stats I didn't believe my eyes. The burst is crazy though. Seems like an interesting ship.

[keith.lamothe]

I just looked at the Neinzul Railpod (stats).. why is it so overpowered? It's dps is: 9360/2*192=898560.. that's without the multipliers.. and that's more than Bobmers' dps with multipliers. With multipliers: 898560*6=5391360. Is it really that op? Did I calculate the dps correctly? Am I missing something?

Did you notice the part where it destroys itself when it fires twice?

It's quite possible they're OP, as I did increase the numbers from the reference Sniper quite a bit, but I did that because I figured it would be necessary to provide a pretty powerful incentive to bother with a ship that only gets two shots.

[LordSloth]

I hate myself for suggesting this.

Give AI Carriers a one to five second delay before they deploy their ships upon entering a player-owned system during a CPA. The reason? Lightning Warheads. Without any leaders or the usual screening force, even a mark 1 lightning warhead is in a good place to pop 1000 or so fleet ships. Alternatively, send a small screening force in first.

Now 2-4 AIP a CPA isn't cheap, except for spire civilians, fallen spire, Alpha: bouncer, hunter slowing things down.

Aside from knowing where the incoming threat is headed, all I have to do is park the lightning warhead directly over the incoming wormhole, no defenses or micro needed, it all takes care of itself, and I take out nearly the entire deployement, missile frigates being the main exception. It feels like cheating.

Then again, it's not like forcing the player to micro will make things any more rewarding or less effective, and maybe the player should be rewarded for recklessly burning AIP since it will bite them on the backend. Still, we've got enough sadists on these forums that I figure someone might appreciate something that makes the AI cleverer.

[keith.lamothe]

The lightning warhead will take care of maybe two thousand ships for you that way, but if the AI's coming in with 10k you can still definitely have problems

Anyway, I can add the deployment delay pretty easily, but I'm not sure if it's a good idea.  People don't seem to like stingy carriers.

[Kahuna]

deployment delay wont do much vs cloaker starship + warheads.
also.. I updated my last post^^

[keith.lamothe]

The burst is crazy though. Seems like an interesting ship.

Yep, I thought it was worth a try to explore a "burst-heavy" type beyond simply the ships that have high reload times.  I'm sure this one is heavily cheesable (just like autobombs or any youngling type when mass-space-dock'd through a wormhole) but the actual practice of using them that way should be sufficiently involved and entertaining that it won't be too unbalancing.  Any ship's first stats need balancing eventually, of course.

[Kahuna]

Yep, I thought it was worth a try to explore a "burst-heavy" type beyond simply the ships that have high reload times.

I like the idea. Railpod is like Zombard but vs lighter ships. In fact.. they're very similar.. but also opposite of each other.
Railpod
-High burst
-Good vs lighter targets
-Long (well.. infinite) range
-Self damaging shots
-Cheap
-Needs spamming
-Needs Mobile Space Docks to unlock it's full potential (I think so)

Zombard
-High burst
-Good vs heavier targets
-Long range
-Durable
-Expensive
-Rarely needs replacing
-Can move and cover long distances (hops)

Good stuff.

[keith.lamothe]

-Needs Mobile Space Docks to unlock it's full potential (I think so)

I suspect that too, on offense.  Not sure how useful they'll be defensively once the enemy force is, say, 5x what its burst can kill.  But the normal space docks can probably clear out an enemy planet pretty efficiently by just loop-building them in FRD through a wormhole (with the docks right next to the WH's other side).

[Toranth]

Crash issue.  I don't know if it's new;  I suspect it's related to the absurd number of ships in this game (hence, no Mantis yet).  But in any case, although I've been getting OutOfMemoryExceptions for the past few days, only after the 6.033 update did it start crashing.
I've attached to this save both the Crash Dump and the save file that led to the crash.  I've tried restarting from that save, and maybe 50% of the time it'll crash in the next few minutes (of game time).  The rest of the time it'll eventually get OutOfMemoryExceptions.


Also strange, as soon as I updated, I started seeing all the new Guardians in that game.  I'm not sure if they were unlocked before, but not deployable, or the AI had unlocks saved up, but I didn't expect an existing game to have them all appearing.